A MASSIVE data breach was reported on June 11 when a bot in a Telegram channel called “hak4learn” offered access to the private information data of millions of vaccinated Indians, according to the Wired website.

The bot allowed anyone to enter a phone number or Aadhaar (India’s national ID) number to access personal information like name, passport number, and date of birth of individuals.

The data appears to have come from India’s CoWIN vaccination tracking app, which has more than one billion registered users.

“The scale of the data breach is what makes it hard to guess the repercussions,” says Srikanth Lakshmanan, a researcher who runs the digital payments collective Cashless Consumer. “Conservative estimates mean at least personal data of several hundred million users was exposed.”

Local news outlets have been able to use the bot to access the personal information of politicians. Wired couldn’t independently verify their reporting; by the morning of June 12 the bot was inactive.

India’s digital public infrastructure has expanded massively over the past several years, with the growing popularity of the Aadhaar identity system, the proliferation of the digital payments system United Payments Interface, and the launch of CoWIN.

This growth has meant that there is a vast amount of public data on file, but digital rights experts worry that cybersecurity and legal frameworks around data storage haven’t kept pace with the growth.

The health ministry has said that claims that the CoWIN portal has been breached are “without any basis” and that the Computer Emergency Response Team, the agency responsible for responding to cybersecurity incidents, has been asked to investigate.

India’s IT minister, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, tweeted that the data accessed by the bot is from a “threat actor database” and that “it does not appear that CoWIN app or database has been directly breached.”

An independent report by digital risk monitoring platform CloudSEK seems to validate this to some extent. The company’s research suggests that rather than having access to the entire CoWIN database or backend, the hackers may have instead gotten hold of multiple credentials from health workers, allowing them more limited access to records.

“What CloudSEK knows with high confidence is that threat actors have access to multiple credentials that belong to health workers that could be used to access the CoWIN portal for those individual health workers and the data they have access to,” says Rahul Sasi, chief executive of CloudSEK. “What we also speculate is some sort of unauthenticated API that would have allowed attackers to query specific user details. But there is no proof at this point of time.”

CoWIN was launched in January 2021 as the foundation of India’s vaccination drive. The platform, which was also available as a mobile app, was used by people to book their vaccination slots and generate a vaccination certificate for themselves and their family members. The government at the time was criticized for making CoWIN the only way for Indians to book a vaccination appointment, excluding millions who didn’t have access to a smartphone or the internet.

This isn’t the first time the news of a CoWIN database has surfaced. In 2021, Dark Leak Market, a hacker group, said it had access to the data of 150 million Indians registered on CoWIN.

Published in Dawn, June 13th, 2023